To the Problem of Literary Translation of W. Stevens’ Poems into Russian

The problem of the translatability of a literary text has remained urgent. At different times, there have been debates in literary science about whether it is permissible and possible to recreate an original work by means of a foreign language. In this article, the Bakhtin thesis on the “dialogue of cultures” and the provisions on the fundamental translatability of a work of art developed in the works of Russian comparative scientists are the starting points.The purpose is to analyze the poems of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens and his Russian – language translations.The program poem by U. Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways to look at the Blackbird” and its translations into Russian served as the material for the study. The study uses the methods of linguo-stylistic analysis of language units, the method of philological analysis of a literary text, and comparative analysis.Creative works of Stevens reflect a general tendency of complexity of the poetic language that was earlier expressed by G. Elliot. Stevens’ poetry remains a mystery, has various interpretations while the author himself does not provide detailed and clear recommendations. The symbol of poetry for Stevens is music – the most abstract kind of art that is why any art should strive towards the state of music. In his poems, Stevens creates a world of imaginary, conditional and mysterious reality. The origins of his poetics go back to romanticism and symbolism, Coleridge’s understanding of the imagination, echoes of Nietzscheanism, Freudian and Jungian motifs. That is the reason why it can be challenging to understand what the author’s poems are about. It leads to multiple interpretations of Stevens’ works. This feature of the poetic style of the American author gives translators freedom when working on Stevens’ texts and actualizes some dominants of original works while obscuring others.An accurate translation of Stevens’ poems is not the same as a successful translation. That is why the researchers recommend to take into consideration his entire artistic heritage (including his theoretical research) when analyzing individual poems. Stevens’ individual poems become parts of a single hypertext that can be understood by having a complete image of an imaginary world created by the author.The paper considers one of the curriculum poems written by Stevens’ “Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird” and the ways of implementation of the author’s conception in its Russian translations. The analysis of the selected translations made it possible to identify the translation made by Britanishsky as the closest to the concept of equivalence. His translation conveys the lexical content of the original poem, though there are significant deviations that deprive the poem of a holistic reconstruction of the author’s idea.

receptive aesthetics, literary translation, adequacy, translation equivalence, artistic method, symbol